Ted Truex - TJT Photography: Blue

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Cooper's Hawk Aerobics

In bird photography, when you encounter a bird that tolerates your presence letting you fire away with your camera without flying away, you call that a 'cooperative bird'. Well last January, I had a Cooper's Hawk visit my backyard to sun himself and preen. I happened to see him land in a tree and observed him for a few moments from inside my house. I was dying to take some pictures of him and after watching him for about 5 minutes, I decided that if I didn't grab my gear and at least try, I would kick myself.

So I grabbed my gear, set up the camera and lens, mounted it on the gimbal head on my tripod and then stepped into the backyard as non-chalantly as I could. I edged out to behind a post holding up my patio cover using that as my blind. I set the camera down and looked at the bird and he was hardly paying attention. The session photographing this bird lasted 10 or more minutes. He stayed so long that at one point, I quit taking pictures and grabbed a couple of minutes of video. I would call this one very cooperative bird.

I came across the two images here while continuing to re-organize my photographs into Lightroom.

Image particulars: Canon 5D MKII, 600mm/f4 lens at f9, 1/320th of a second, ISO 400 on a Wimberley WH200 Head and Gitzo 3541LS tripod.

This image and others are available at my website.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Syncing LR3 with My Website and FlickR

For a few years I used Adobe CS4 with Bridge for my image processing. Essentially I cataloged my images by folder and name. Well a friend of mine forwarded me a link last "Black Friday" (November 25th) with a deal on Lightroom 3 and I took the bait. After working with LR3 for almost 2 months now I am a fan. I have altered my workflow to use LR and not Bridge and beginning about mid-December, all new images have been imported into LR as the beginning of my workflow. It has taken a little bit of work to get used to the publish support in LR. But once I downloaded the plug-ins created by Jeff Friedl and got my mind wrapped around a couple of concepts, I realized I had been working way to hard!

So what about all of the images I had prior to the LR3 purchase? Well...that is an on-going project. I decided the first thing to do was to get my website and LR3 in synch and I completed that task in December. The next thing is to get the photos on FlickR in synch with LR3. Getting the photos synch'ed takes some work and is a little tedious so I am slowly "chipping away" at the rock. Here is one of the latest images that I synch'ed up.

This is a Western Bluebird I photographed in December 2010.
Image particulars: Canon 5D MKII, 600mm/f4 lens at f4 and 1/2000th of a second, ISO 400.

This image and others are available at my website.